Frontlines sucks Ultra megathread

[DolphinsFan]

I have quite a few issues with these "commanders", and most of it comes down to their general attitude, and behaviour towards the community.

They will be the first ones to hop on here, make fresh accounts and tell everyone about how positive they are for the community, how they do this, that, and the other thing. How gracious of them. Yet they will often talk down to the community, they insult people who play "Non Meta" jobs, sometimes even openly in Alliance chat, and I've seen some nasty discord chat logs, (especially when their teams aren't dancing to their tune). They seem to forget that they're curb stomping 2 teams of 48 other players who often have no relation with each other, and limited experience with PvP, and that nobody is impressed by their winrates, or how "skilled" they seem to believe they are.

90% of the hostility in the pvp community is a response to the amount of toxicity directed at them from people who don't make a serious effort to learn, and who join discords to skim for gotcha moments and start arguments rather than try to engage in productive conversation.
Fwiw, I think making fun of people for playing non-meta classes is stupid, because you can put up good and helpful stats on any class. Now if you're going to type in chat "this drk so stupid cant even win with prmade" then put up a statline of 0-4-12 with 100K dmg, yeah you're going to catch some flack. Also for all the talk about premades only caring about meta comps in this thread, I find a statement like "they're curb stomping 2 teams 48 other players who often have no relation with each other, and limited experience with PvP" telling, as from my own experience, it is exceedingly rare for there to be premades in only one team. Just no one cares about those other premades because they aren't playing the spooky 2 drk 1 ast 1 drg comp (I've literally touched none of these classes).

[Mawlzy]

90% of the hostility in the pvp community is a response to the amount of toxicity directed at them from people who don't make a serious effort to learn, and who join discords to skim for gotcha moments and start arguments rather than try to engage in productive conversation.

Fins, I've played many matches with you. You're amusing in chat and a strong player. I'd like to suggest a different reason for the origin of the hostility.

In FL at the moment, we have two groups who are serious about the mode, but who have completely different goals. And these goals clash massively. Olivia and her minions are the archetype of the first group. They place wins above everything else, and consequently play meta stacks. The second serious group is comprised of solo players who work hard on getting better, but who emphasize enjoyable matches above wins. For them, being ordered around is not enjoyable. The gameplay that a meta stack produces is not enjoyable.

Setting aside the players who don't care at all, these two groups of serious players get dumped in the same matches where their playstyles are completely at odds with each other. The key to greatly reducing the current hostility is by removing that clash of styles through queue separation.

[saucyshortcake]

Fins, I've played many matches with you. You're amusing in chat and a strong player. I'd like to suggest a different reason for the origin of the hostility.

In FL at the moment, we have two groups who are serious about the mode, but who have completely different goals. And these goals clash massively. Olivia and her minions are the archetype of the first group. They place wins above everything else, and consequently play meta stacks. The second serious group is comprised of solo players who work hard on getting better, but who emphasize enjoyable matches above wins. For them, being ordered around is not enjoyable. The gameplay that a meta stack produces is not enjoyable.

Setting aside the players who don't care at all, these two groups of serious players get dumped in the same matches where their playstyles are completely at odds with each other. The key to greatly reducing the current hostility is by removing that clash of styles through queue separation.

the reason people like olivia stick to frontlines is because anytime he tries any other pvp mode we swiftly remind him why he should stick to only pvp'ing once every 3 days on shatter. and we're sorry you have to deal with him.

[OliviaLugria]

the reason people like olivia stick to frontlines is because anytime he tries any other pvp mode we swiftly remind him why he should stick to only pvp'ing once every 3 days on shatter. and we're sorry you have to deal with him.

lol what? It definitely doesn't have anything to do with a consistent streaming schedule, making time for other content or games, or playing her favorite map. I can go command the other maps just as well, and if you're talking about CC (already gotten top 100), so I guess that leaves RW?

Who even are you?

[saucyshortcake]

yeah how fortunate it lines up with only playing the game on shatter days.

we get it, grats you can feel good about pub stomping randoms doing an exp queue while you tryhard spam macros for a full game on a poorly designed map. maybe next you can break into an elementary school and pwn everyone in a fist fight. you'll make top 100(lol) there too i'm sure.

[Crusader1]

lmfao, that was funny! champion!

[Archeron]

90% of the hostility in the pvp community is a response to the amount of toxicity directed at them from people who don't make a serious effort to learn, and who join discords to skim for gotcha moments and start arguments rather than try to engage in productive conversation.

Your discord is your responsibility, and anything that occurs on it is 100% on you. Don't want people looking for Gotcha moments on your server? Don't allow toxicity, undprocutive conversation and other behaviour that reflects poorly on your community to be on your servers in the first place. Also just how do you classify someone is "Not trying to learn" because I've seen sarcastic and misleading answers on a lot of PvP servers, some people are going to be skeptical about the advice they are recieving. People being toxic ingame towards premades that aren't winning are also easily dealt with via support desk tickets.

Fwiw, I think making fun of people for playing non-meta classes is stupid, because you can put up good and helpful stats on any class. Now if you're going to type in chat "this drk so stupid cant even win with prmade" then put up a statline of 0-4-12 with 100K dmg, yeah you're going to catch some flack. Also for all the talk about premades only caring about meta comps in this thread, I find a statement like "they're curb stomping 2 teams 48 other players who often have no relation with each other, and limited experience with PvP" telling, as from my own experience, it is exceedingly rare for there to be premades in only one team. Just no one cares about those other premades because they aren't playing the spooky 2 drk 1 ast 1 drg comp (I've literally touched none of these classes).

Premades are not fun to play with. That is our core problem. Get caught in salted earth? You die. You either instantly evaporate people, or you get instantly evaporated. Now in theory, you would assume that "Hey every team has a premade now! That would make it more fun!" It actually doesn't. The gameplay is repetitive, and boring, and greatly encourages the use of a limited number of jobs to power up the meat grinder. That is not fun gameplay to me. Meta stack is boring, and it encourages me not to queue a second time when I see this sort of gameplay, as it does with so many other people.

Now personally if you're contributing nothing to the match, and doing less than 100k dmg (Or even less than 300k dmg on any job) then I think they should be looking inwards rather than outwards. Most of the people complaining about premades here I can safely assume have some idea what they are doing with any given job they've chosen to play. The way to address these underperforming players who complain openly in Alliance chat is to ignore them, especially when they've got nothing productive to say. Calling them out, telling them they're bad, saying they need to play X job, or kicking people from the match because they're not playing to your teams tune however is unacceptable, and I've seen that a whole lot, especially on Aether/Primal. (Not directed @Olivia)

"Bad" premades, or even just a single commander running around aren't the problem. Nobody is calling a stack of 4 Scholars, or 4 dragoons, or any other "Sub optimal" non Dark premade unfair. A team of random players can still pose a threat to them, and it doesn't crater our winrates into the single digits when they're playing. DRK/DRK/RPR/AST does, and the solution is to both nerf DRK knight, and I would limit premade parties further down to two players.

Now is EVERY premade commander toxic, and trying to ruin the game mode for everyone? (Specifically to those who run DRK/DRK) Probably not. But are they? Yes, and they should have some self awareness of what they're doing, and why people despise it, and why there are calls to adjust Dark knight to end the Meta. It's not unreasonable for people to be miffed about being insta-killed repeatedly and having their winrates plummet because they lost the 1/3 chance of being on the premades side. The two sides to this will never come to any kind of agreement.

[Zalestra]

Premades are not fun to play with. That is our core problem. Get caught in salted earth? You die. You either instantly evaporate people, or you get instantly evaporated. Now in theory, you would assume that "Hey every team has a premade now! That would make it more fun!" It actually doesn't. The gameplay is repetitive, and boring, and greatly encourages the use of a limited number of jobs to power up the meat grinder. That is not fun gameplay to me. Meta stack is boring, and it encourages me not to queue a second time when I see this sort of gameplay, as it does with so many other people.

I agree strongly with most of your post, but I wanted to highlight this part for a couple reasons.
I literally hopped on the forums tonight after witnessing this happen in my last FL game. This morning, I was happily running several games of FL over and over even though my team kept losing. It was okay though, I was getting in lots of kills and people were just trying their best, so I had a drive to get a win. After my win, I took a break for most of the day.

30 minutes ago I queued up again looking for more of that fun. Immediately, I can see another team has a meta premade. They just feed on my team (and 3rd team) over and over, and there was nothing my team (or 3rd team) could do about it. I didn't get killed, but it seems like most people don't know they need to shield when they get pulled in... and there's nothing I can do when majority of my teammates are dying around me instantly.
Meta team wins with a double or triple point lead over both other teams.

Why the hell would I want to queue up again after that? Yeah I might get lucky and get on the "winning" side, but chances are I wont, and whats the point anyway?

One last thing to say on this post: even though this is an issue, I personally don't want SE to remove 4man premades. I have a lot of fun queuing with my FC mates into this mode, as its the only PVP we can do together. Its the casual mode, 4man is okay. I was sad when 8man was removed...
I would really prefer some other solution.